More On Invite Media And Google; Looking At Fetchback And GSI; M&A Mayhem!

The news world ran with Peter Kafka's story of the Google acquisition of Invite Media yesterday. The Business Insider wrote a feature on Invite Media CEO Nat Turner that includes a picture of Turner and Richard Branson as well as info on Turner's baseball card collecting business way back when. Read it. TechCrunch reported on the news and added Google's official statement: "Although we’re always talking to various companies about a variety of things, we don’t comment on rumor or speculation." Read it.

Looking At The Fetchback Acquisition

Convertro CEO Jeff Zwelling looks at the GSI Commerce acquisition and says that Google entering the retargeting market didn't bode well for Fetchback and that results Convertro was seeing across retargeters proved it out. He writes, "While there were some benefits to keeping Fetchback alive to maximize reach, it was obvious that the massively different ROI did not mean that our clients were long for Fetchback." Read more.

Hearst, iCrossing, Officially

The Wall Street Journal's Shira Ovide reports that at Hearst and iCrossing have made it official with Hears potentially paying up to $400 million for the digital marketing services agency if they hit all their goals. As the details are now "finalized," Vranica says "Hearst hired a former Meredith executive, Matthew Petersen, to run the newly created Hearst Marketing Services, which will house iCrossing and future marketing-services investments." Read more.

Image Ad Self-Serve

Image Space Media officially announced its self-service, in-image advertising product, AdStart. The Image Space Media blogger claims that performance is over the top: "Compared to Google AdWords, AdStart yielded a CTR seven times higher for a fraction of the cost." Are clicks back? Read more.

Comscore Rankings

Comscore publicly released its video ad network reach numbers for April 2010. The findings include: "The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: Joost Video Network (by Adconion Media Group) with 36.6 percent penetration of online video viewers, BrightRoll Video Network with 19.5 percent, and BBE with 18.5 percent." Read it. Comscore also announced that according to its data, social networking is the fastest growing content in mobile. Who knew? Everyone.

Transpera Gets $9 Million

Mobile video ad network, Transpera, announced another round of funding to the tune of $9 mil thanks to BlackBerry Partners Fund and additioinal participation from Flybridge Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Intel Capital and Labrador Ventures. That brings their total funding to-date to $18 million. Read more.

Political Ads Online

On ClickZ, Kate Kaye covers a Florida law which may significantly and positively impact ad dollars coming online for political campaigns. Kaye says, "Florida's new rules allow political candidates to run all sorts of online ads without including a "paid for by" style disclaimer." Good for online. Bad for the voter? How about a (another) little thingamajig in the corner of an ad which allows you to click and find out who paid for the ad. Is there a startup available to make this happen? Read it.

When Brand And DR Collide

MDC Partners and kbs+p's Darren Herman hits his personal blog again with "The Advertiser Collision" as he discusses a recent blogosphere hot topic of brand and direct response dollars colliding in digital. He writes, "Now that we can measure to some extent, the traditionally measurement-untouched ivory tower media channels dollar allocations will start to be reallocated to more measurable channels." Read more.

Bizo Launces Self-Serve

Bizo has officially opened its self-serve advertising platform for SMB B2B marketers. Naming it BizAds (was MyAds), Bizo enables SMB's who want to use display advertising across Bizo's B2B audience segments and "reach more than 60 million targeted business people across the Web." Data and media unite once again! Visit the BizAds page. And, read the release.

Adap.tv Adds Data

Adap.tv announced the addition of data partner eXelate for its online video advertising marketplace. From the release on using the eXelate data through Adap.tv: "There is no integration process for buyers who want to leverage eXelate's registration-based data inside the marketplace, making buying audience-targeted campaigns as simple as selecting the desired user segments from a pull down menu." This would seem different than an exchange, for example, where a marketer might use a DSP to map cookie data to exchange inventory. Read the release.